James Stewart

James Stewart is a co-founder of the Government Digital Service where he now works as Chief Architect and deputy to the UK Government CTO. He leads a team of architects, developers and operations engineers who are at the heart of transforming government services. Working across government, he has helped make the move toward a more user-centric and platform-based architecture for government services.

He was responsible for the technical architecture of the award winning GOV.UK, building the acclaimed team behind it, supporting the delivery of dozens of projects across government and transforming the UK Government’s relationship with open source by “coding in the open.” He’s been instrumental in the UK government’s move to use of public cloud and coordinates the network of senior technology leaders across government.

The technical work he has led has underpinned solutions that have won a variety of awards including the Design Museum’s Design of the Year and a D&AD Black Pencil. The work of GDS was described by O’Reilly Radar as “the default for how government should approach their online efforts in the 21st century”, has inspired similar initiatives around the globe and has been widely celebrated.

James has advised a number of startups and is currently a member of GitHub‘s Customer Advisory Board. Prior to joining the civil service James ran an agency providing websites, business tools and product development to a range of small businesses, charities and entertainment industry clients. He’s a regular conference speaker covering topics from technical architecture and modern development techniques to digital transformation.